According to the passage, period treatises are an unreliable guide to ordinary practice because they

were written long after the music they describe.

were addressed to amateurs rather than to professional players.

survive only in fragments from a handful of cities.

record what was contested or unusual rather than what everyone already shared.

The author distinguishes two projects that "authenticity" is used to name principally in order to

show that success in the achievable one does not deliver the unachievable one.

argue that neither project is worth attempting.

establish that the second project has now been accomplished.

suggest that the movement should adopt a different name for itself.

It can be inferred that the author regards the claim that a lighter bow stroke "articulates a particular line better" as

an evasion of the historical questions the movement was founded to answer.

equivalent in force to a claim about documented period practice.

a more modest claim than the movement's original one, and better supported.

persuasive only to listeners already familiar with period instruments.

Which of the following, if true, would most undermine the second difficulty the author raises in paragraph two?

Several period treatises have been discovered since the movement began.

Listeners with no prior exposure to later repertoire respond to Baroque dissonance much as documented eighteenth-century accounts describe.

Period instruments are now manufactured to a higher standard than they were fifty years ago.

Modern audiences report enjoying period-instrument performances more than conventional ones.

The author's overall attitude toward the historically informed performance movement is best described as

admiring of its aims and confident that they have largely been met.

hostile to it as an exercise in false precision.

indifferent, treating it as one performance style among many.

appreciative of what it achieved, while rejecting the terms in which it described itself.

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The Authenticity Problem in Historically Informed Performance

PRACTICE

100:00+4 −1MCQ Single Answer

Reading Passage

The historically informed performance movement set out to play early music as it would have sounded to the audiences for whom it was written. Gut strings replaced steel, valveless horns replaced valved ones, pitch was lowered to the standards documented in the relevant decade, and ornamentation was reconstructed from period treatises. The premise was that the interpretive habits of the nineteenth century — the broad vibrato, the swelling line, the large orchestra — had accumulated over Baroque scores like varnish over a painting, and that removing them would return the listener to something closer to the composer's intention. The difficulty is that the documentary record underdetermines the performance it is asked to authorize. Treatises describe what their authors considered worth arguing about, which is by definition what was contested or unusual; the ordinary practice that everyone shared went unrecorded precisely because no one needed to be told. An archive of disputes is a poor guide to consensus. A second difficulty is less often acknowledged and more intractable. Even a performance reconstructed perfectly would fall on ears that have heard Wagner and Stravinsky, and a dissonance that unsettled a listener in 1720 cannot unsettle one in 2026 in the same way. "Authenticity" therefore names two projects that are routinely conflated: fidelity to documented practice, and recovery of an original effect. The first is achievable and the second is not, and achieving the first does nothing to deliver the second. What the movement actually accomplished is better described as defamiliarization than as restoration. By making the conventions of nineteenth-century performance audible as conventions rather than as the natural way to play, it converted a set of inherited habits into a set of visible choices — and a choice, once visible, has to be defended. The most persuasive practitioners now argue for their decisions on musical grounds, claiming that a lighter bow stroke articulates a particular line better, rather than on the historical ground that it is what was done. That is a weaker claim than the one the movement began with. It is also the only one the evidence will support.

The primary purpose of the passage is to